Filed under: Software, Snow Leopard
Office 2008 and Spaces issues, finally fixed in Snow Leopard?
One feature of Mac OS X, sometimes forgotten about, that has caused gripes from many users for a long time is Spaces. When it was first introduced almost two years ago in Leopard, some applications would not always "play nice" with each other, causing windows not to display or move correctly. Microsoft Office applications in particular were prone to these problems. There were always some nagging issues that would not allow Spaces to work correctly, due to the way Office windows are drawn on the screen. Over time, they started working better, but a few issues still remained with Office, especially in Word when the Toolbox floating window was in use.
With Snow Leopard's debut, however, Microsoft states that these issues have been fixed through "collaborative efforts" with Apple. Hopefully, this will help a lot of eager and frustrated Spaces users manage their many windows on their desktops.
Do you use Spaces, or have you held off because of these issues? Leave a comment below and share your experiences!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Stephen.4 said 4:20PM on 9-02-2009
Confirmed :).
Snow Leopard and Office 2008 and it no longer jumps spaces!
Finally I can use Office again...
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Ian said 4:23PM on 9-02-2009
I turned Spaces off because of Office misbehaving. Now I know it's supposed to be fixed I might turn it back on...
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VM said 4:25PM on 9-02-2009
Never had any problems with Spaces. Then again I don't use Office.
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matt said 5:53PM on 9-02-2009
Always used Spaces, don't use Office, iWork '09 does the job for me. I hate using Office 2007 on University computers, glad I have a laptop this year.
Todd Sieling said 6:20PM on 9-02-2009
Ditto. I can't imagine using MS Office. Every time I see it I get confused.
xatruio said 4:59PM on 9-02-2009
i don't use Spaces for the simple fact that it is such a RAM hog, plus there's already Hide..... so it is quite pointless as far as I am concerned.
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Dan Stuchbury said 4:56PM on 9-02-2009
I have Excel set to run in a particular space, however with it running it opens in the currently active space. If I quit Excel, then open a spreadsheet, it'll open in its designated space, which (I think) it what it did in Leopard.
The floating toolbox issue appears to be resolved though - was annoying having to go looking for it before.
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Digaos said 4:41PM on 9-02-2009
I found one weird behavior when using spaces in Snow Leopard.
I use 6 spaces and I wasn't able to switch from 1 to 6 using ctrl+6. I was able to go from 1 to 2 and then to 6, or 1, 3 then 6, but not from 1 to 6 directly.
Before commenting on the SL problems post, I decided to check the Spaces preferences and sure enough my ctrl+number shortcut was disable. After enabling it SL start to behave as expected...
So, even with the option to use ctrl+number disable, I was able to use this key combination, although with an erratic behavior.
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PhilH said 4:46PM on 9-02-2009
It's nearly fixed. If I click the Office app icon in the dock, or cmd-tab to it, the correct space is shown. That's an improvement. However, if there are two windows of, say, Excel open in that space it seems reluctant to switch between them via Exposé.
Still, 100% better than it was.
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Dorv said 8:04PM on 9-02-2009
Seconded!
FrAPallA said 4:49PM on 9-02-2009
Spaces is really an useful feature, principally on my MBP. I had only a problem with MSN Messenger on Leopard
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Jeffrey said 4:48PM on 9-02-2009
I have to say that I love the new Spaces for SLeo 10.6. I've been using SLeo for a couple months now since the developer version became more stable, and the spaces improvements are great. Spaces now works amazing with Expose and I really enjoy being able to set designated spaces for specific applications to launch. I've yet to figure out a way to keep one set of spaces on one screen while allowing another set on another. Soon i will figure it out.
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John said 4:51PM on 9-02-2009
Entourage is *the* reason I use Spaces. I can't stand that little Progress window that pops up every few minutes to tell me that it's syncronizing with the Exchange server. You can't turn the feature off either. So I keep Entourage in a separate space, and only go there when I want to read my e-mail.
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Harvey said 11:43PM on 9-02-2009
Funny you should say that. On my machine, that little status window would occasionally (not always) yank me back to that space on it's own. Freaky and annoying.
stuck said 4:52PM on 9-02-2009
Java is another application that typically has problems. The symptoms being you'd alt-tab to the application and not switch to the correct space. Kinda silly considering the Java port is handled by Apple.
Any improvement in snow leopard? I'm waiting for a couple of Input Managers-dependent apps to be updated.
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Troy Murray said 4:52PM on 9-02-2009
I just stopped using MS Word 2008 and started using Pages '08 / '09, exporting any files as a PDF or Word if I needed to share them. I'm a heavy user of Spaces and the Spaces + Word issue drove me nuts.
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Grodesh said 5:02PM on 9-02-2009
The only application that gave me problems with Spaces in Leopard was Lightroom 2. When it was running in fullscreen in one of my spaces, clicking on the dock icon would hide the dock and the taskbar (because Lightroom was running fullscreen) but it wouldn't switch to the space Lightroom was running in.
This is now fixed in Snow Leopard!
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Ethan said 5:04PM on 9-02-2009
A window follows me along in Final Cut Express, forgot which one though.
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sinX said 5:11PM on 9-02-2009
lol..This was fixed in 10.5.7...
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Cy Starkman said 11:02PM on 9-02-2009
what was, the MS Office jumping window magic trick? I ain't seen no fix on 10.5.anything
The comment reports on Office working better in SL is a freakin god send, it is almost the only reason one needs to upgrade.
Apple should have advertised this as a feature, screw Exchange, that's drivel compared to this.